Sodexo brings 24,000 buildings and 1.2 million assets to the Cloud

As Sodexo’s footprint expanded across five continents, it was critical to move their enterprise asset management (EAM) solution to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model to cut costs and improve the client experience.

The decision to move to a SaaS model can be driven by a variety of motivations, such as:

“I need to reduce fixed costs”

“I need to meet client needs for data localization requirements”

“I need a scalable solution that grows with my business”

“I need a licensing structure that matches my usage patterns”

“I need to be able to rapidly deploy new functionalities”

Sodexo, a French food services and facilities management company headquartered in Paris, had similar motivations. Serving 75 million customers and 425,000 employees daily across eighty countries, the volume of services required to maintain operations is massive.

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To put this into context, within one building their services can range from the basement to the front desk/reception area to grounds keeping to employee childcare to the cafeteria, all the way up through the building floors, including cleaning & maintenance services. See Figure 1.

How to manage 1.2 million assets in a simpler, more cost-efficient way?

With over 24,000 buildings to manage and an incredible disparity in client facilities (offices, hospitals, research centers, schools, factories, etc), it became a cumbersome task to manage over 1.2 million assets, 7,000 technical users, and 100,000 self-service portals for clients to request services. These services require an extensive asset management solution to improve visibility into operations to help manage costs and resources.

Why move to SaaS?

Sodexo identified their critical pain points and evaluated how these challenge areas could be addressed by deploying a SaaS environment – for example:

With their current solution hosted in North America, they could not meet increasing client needs for data localization requirements, in particular from clients in the European Union (EU) facing new standards presented in the European Legal Data Framework.

Their current solution was incurring large fixed costs and provided limited flexibility/agility

They wanted to move to a “concurrent licensing” usage pattern as their current “named user” license was proving to be an ineffective use of resources.

Managing growth on five continents required increased flexibility and scalability.

Ultimately, Sodexo wanted to maintain the integrity of the core solution while solving for regional data localization, optimizing their licensing structure, and cutting costs.

The largest Maximo SaaS implementation ever

With these challenges in mind, IBM worked with Sodexo to migrate 1.2 million assets to the cloud. Using the SaaS Flex solution, two production instances were implemented on IBM Cloud, one in the United States and one in the EU, with the opportunity to have additional production instances anywhere in the world. Having instances in multiple IBM Cloud locations across the globe addressed clients’ data localization issues.

The organization was also able to take advantage of their low concurrency usage pattern (~10%) with the SaaS Concurrent User licensing model, enabling them to optimize their licensing structure based on their global workforce.

The icing on the cake

While SaaS migration will not be complete until June 1, 2017, Sodexo has already begun reaping the benefits. As a result of using a SaaS environment, the facilities management company gained a level of agility and flexibility that was previously impossible to achieve. Sodexo has benefited from faster upgrades, rapid deployment of new functionalities, scalability, and simplified governance.

“The [icing] on the cake,” according to Vincent Ribet, VP Facilities Management Applications for Sodexo, was that “this shift to SaaS led to a 20% reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO)” and increased cost predictability across their buildings.

Is SaaS right for you?

If your business is facing similar challenges, or you’re not sure what SaaS option is right for you, compare your options in the SaaS Buyer’s Guide.